Reframing Indigenous Biography: an introduction

Indigenous cricketers alongside the Melbourne Cricket Ground Pavilion, c.1867 (detail). Team members: at rear (left to right), Tarpot, T W Wills, Johnny Mullagh; front row, King Cole (leg on chair), Dick-a-Dick (standing); seated (left to right), Jellico, Peter, Red Cap, Harry Rose [Tiger Rose?], Bullocky, Cuzens]. Source: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South WalesThe existential predicament of modern Indigeneity, forged in the violent and traumatic history of colonialism, makes the sympathetic retrieval and respectful portrait of a whole life especially fraught, precious, and important.

National biographical dictionaries have long deemed Indigenous lives insignificant and peripheral. Yet those we know about are, by definition, extraordinary.

As Alice Te Punga Somerville declares in this book, ‘There’s something remarkable about any Indigenous ancestor who has survived the attempted genocide of the last centuries’.

Nah Doongh, probably outside the Shand home in Penrith, c. 1891. Source: Grace Karskens.

Grace Karskens, in her portrait of Nah Doongh, a woman from Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury-Nepean River, argues that the first generation of Aboriginal children who grew up in a conquered land ‘endured the most difficult challenges faced by people anywhere’. And Jill Giese, in her study of the nineteenth-century Wotjobaluk man, Yanggendyinanyuk, asks: ‘How did he survive this cataclysm to thrive in the perilous world of his stolen country?’—a land in which ‘squatters stole his land and missionaries stalked his soul’. These Indigenous lives were significant in themselves and in their own cultures, of course, but the experience of colonialism—of navigating ‘a new, dynamic, dangerous, hybrid world’ (as Karskens puts it)—endowed many Indigenous lives with exceptional meaning. Empire and its overbearing archive dismissed Indigenous creativity, marginalised these peoples, imagined them absent, belittled their lives, and rationalised their deaths, so how is their full humanity now to be reclaimed?

All the chapters in this volume wrestle with this awesome task of how biographers might free themselves from the stereotypes and sheer power of the settler narratives that so dominate history-making and the documentary archive. Karskens poses the question: ‘what happens when we place Nah Doongh at the centre of her own story?’ And Kate Fullagar asks: ‘what if we try to look beyond the drama of contact to measure the full length of a life, from cradle to grave rather than from encounter to encounter?’ Mike McDonnell finds that his biographical subject, an Anishinaabe leader at the centre of the Odawa community of North America, was no mere mediator for the European world but was in fact operating in an almost entirely independent and complex tapestry of Indigenous worlds where Europeans were marginal. And Konishi strives to free the Whadjuk Noongar man Yagan from the cruel definition of his death—his brutal murder, decapitation, and the trafficking of his head—and recovers instead the fullness of his living, charismatic presence, his true corporeality.

Indigenous biography challenges traditional conventions of time and place. Place is more significant and time less linear. In this collection, different conceptions of time are discussed—dreamtime, deep time, ‘now-time’—concepts that embody different relations between past and present and different understandings of ethics and social and scholarly responsibility. And that responsibility extends to the elements, the land, air, and oceans, to other creatures who are also ancestral and themselves invite biographies. The landscape is ‘seeded with ancestors’, as the Māori scholar Arini Loader puts it; it is ‘deeply biographic’. In Chapter 1 on ‘Biographies of the Dreaming’, we explore ways of escaping the confines of ‘national’ biography and, in Australia, of reaching across the rupture of 1788.

As we declare in that opening chapter, ‘Naming people changes the kind of history we write’.

Part of the magic of biography is to conjure intimacy through the power of a known name and the example of a real, individual life. But traditional Western parameters of biography such as a consistent name and precise birth and death dates are often undermined by Indigenous life experience, especially under colonialism. Loader describes how Māori naming practices are more fluid, less focused on control, and more event-based; they maintain immediacy, cultivate a living dialogue, and connect past and present. Aboriginal peoples, too, had many names over their lifetimes, some foisted upon them, as the biographies in this book illustrate. Names could obscure as well as define. Knowledge of Nah Doongh’s early womanhood and where and when she died is ‘highly tenuous, speculative, spun from single names, strung on gossamer threads’. Karskens shows how reconstructing such a life requires ‘a slow, patient gleaning of tiny, incidental fragments, a re-reading of racist accounts “against the grain”’.

In Indigenous cultures, knowledge is lived, embodied, spoken, heard—and written. Literacy and orality can be complementary and coexistent. Loader reports that in Aotearoa, oral knowledge ‘was etched on the head’ (literally ‘skull’). She quotes two Māori men describing how they learned to read: ‘We learnt every day, every night. We did not lie down to sleep. We sat at night in the hut, all around the fire in the middle. Whiwhi [Mātene Te Whiwhi] had part of the book, and I part. Sometimes we went to sleep upon the book for a while, then woke up, and read again’. The book was absorbed almost physically, etched on the head like oral lore.

In the early days of the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB), documentation explicitly determined selection. The accident of the archive, its systematic blindness, and imperial oppressions were relatively unexamined and accepted. As Katerina Teaiwa, Nicholas Hoare, and Talei Luscia Mangioni explain in their chapter on Australia’s ‘missing’ Pacific women, the Pacific historian Harry Maude made it clear in 1959 that the inclusion of Islanders in the ADB should be predicated on there being ‘enough documentary material extant relating to them’—which, given the state of the field at the time, necessarily excluded many possible Islander entries. In this volume, Teaiwa, Hoare, and Mangioni argue for Australian histories that are less ‘domestic’ and more conscious of Oceania; indeed, they call for ‘an expansion of the traditional scope of what constitutes Australian coloniality’.

Some of the chapters in this book work against persistent stereotypes of Indigenous lives: that after invasion their significance was chiefly shaped by colonialism, that they are necessarily grounded in a single beloved place, and that Indigenous lived experience is not individualistic but collective (thus suggesting that Indigenous biography is a paradox). Mobility and worldliness, for example, were often assumed to dilute Indigeneity. But for Indigenous peoples, so often confined and controlled by the state, ‘transnational mobility becomes an anticolonial act’, as Te Punga Somerville argues. Fullagar describes Pacific Indigenous lives of adventurous mobility. Hitihiti, she argues, was no innocent naif marooned on the edge of the earth, but ‘one of the most cosmopolitan persons of the eighteenth century’. Nah Doongh had a mobile life too, more so than was assumed, and recognising her mobility was the key to understanding her history—and the meaning of her song.

An Indigenous life might be denied precise birth and death dates by history, but it might elude them too, drawing meaning and definition from other dimensions of time, space, and being.

Te Punga Somerville gives the example of Reweti Kohere’s 1949 biography of his grandfather Mokena Kohere, The story of a Maori chief, where only half of the chapters of the book focus on the period of the subject’s own life. The biography goes back a few generations to establish ‘some standing for my grandfather in the tribal history’. ‘This is the kind of “background”’, explains Te Punga Somerville, ‘that takes up half the book’. And ‘background’ may embrace ancestral connections, even the lives of other beings and creatures. As we argue in Chapter 2:

 

many of the dynamics of Western history and biography—time, change, power, capital, hierarchy, empire—are muted in Aboriginal cultures where cycles, kinship and abidingness prevail. These values make for a different sense of life course and purpose. Indigenous biography is destined to be different in shape and character.

 

And who should be the authors of such lives? What happens if, rather than avoiding descendants of biographical subjects as authors (which has been ADB practice), one instead seeks them out as writers? The discipline of Indigenous Studies, explains Te Punga Somerville, ‘emphasises the importance of connection with one’s research as an ethical and necessary response to colonial dehumanising forms of research’. Authors in this book, following Te Punga Somerville and Daniel Heath Justice in Indigenous Conversations about Biography, insist on ‘Indigenous biographies as more than past-tense histories of study, but rather, as meaningful and ongoing living relationships in the world’.33 Teaiwa, Hoare, and Mangioni refer to the biographical work of the Māori scholar Aroha Harris where she argues that ‘Māori scholarship embraces and even demands subjectivity’.

Collaborative, multifocal storytelling is at the heart of the Waanyi woman Alexis Wright’s monumental biography (Tracker) of the Arrernte man and Aboriginal leader, Tracker Tilmouth (1954–2015). Tracker did not leave a paper trail, explains Wright in her interview with Tom Griffiths (Chapter 10); rather, ‘his archive, his filing cabinet, was in the minds of other people’. So the author developed an unusual style of biography to represent this extraordinary man in the immediate aftermath of his death. ‘I thought quite deeply about how to do this book, and at the beginning I had no idea’, she recalls. ‘The way I developed the process was that we would all share in it, in a fashion, in telling the story. Everyone would tell their story’. The biography is thus a kaleidoscope of stories and memories from many, sometimes conflicting points of view. This collaborative structure matched Wright’s experience of ‘every meeting I’ve ever been to… we always let everybody have their say’. ‘This is how we reach a consensus’, she explains: ‘This is how everybody can feel that they have a part in how the story is told’. On receiving the 2018 Stella Prize for Tracker, Wright declared that she was grateful ‘for the storytelling skills of our culture and carried them into this book’.

In the final chapter of this volume, Natalie Harkin, a Narungga woman living on Kaurna country, explains how she has been inspired by Alexis Wright’s ‘consensus’ model of storytelling in her current writing of an archival-poetic collective memoir or collaborative biography of ‘Aunty Glad’. Aunty Gladys Elphick was a Kaurna, Ngadjuri, and Narungga Elder who established the Council for Aboriginal Women in South Australia (CAWSA) in 1966. In contrast to Tracker, Elphick did leave a paper trail.

Harkin’s own research manifested as ‘feverish gathering and hoarding of primary source materials from state-based collections’ as well as ‘file notes and memory fragments’, thus unwittingly replicating ‘the very thing I was attempting to disrupt, the Archive Box’. She found that the only way to reckon with it all ‘was to examine the origins of the archive itself’.

Although wrestling constantly with the documentary archive, Harkin explains that her research and writing always grow out of lived experience and are ‘underpinned with a deep sense of acknowledgment, accountability, and responsibility that extends beyond ethical considerations for academic research’. Thus she is dealing also with a ‘living, breathing archive’. Family relationships, intergenerational memories, and a sense of belonging to place are integral to her work and cannot be separated from it. Such research, explains Harkin, is organic and collective and underpinned by key ideas of ‘blood memory’ that resonate strongly with her.

To demonstrate the aims of this volume, notably the importance of approaches that challenge conventions of biographical writing in the English-speaking world, we include a series of life stories from the Indigenous ADB (IADB), also accessible on ADB Online. They were chosen because they vividly illustrate important elements of Indigenous biographical writing, as well as relating inspiring but often poignant stories of hardship, survival and triumph. Malcolm Allbrook’s biography of Lady Mungo and Mungo Man, both of whom lived in the Willandra Lakes region of western New South Wales around 40,000 years ago, acknowledges the limitations of the documentary record in portraying the two figures biographically. From the science, we can barely know them. But since their bodily remains emerged from the lunettes of Lake Mungo, they have come to symbolise their peoples’ occupation and ownership of the land since time immemorial. To the Mutthi Mutthi, Paakantji, and Ngyiampa traditional owners, they are not the mute, ossified remnants of scientific research. They are individuals who once had a corporeal presence; they are also family who, as old people, have returned to teach not only their people, but all Australians, that the land they occupy is Aboriginal.

NSW police officer talking to Aboriginal man, John Noble, also known as “Marvellous”, at the opening of Federal Parliament, 1927. Source: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

Mandy Paul’s biography of Maria Welch relates the Kaurna matriarch’s whole life story, from her birth just before thearrival of European colonisers in 1836, until her passing at Point Pearce in 1909. Over her life she witnessed the ‘heavy toll’ on her people of the growing city of Adelaide. The documentary sources on her life are meagre, but her legacy is immense. Her knowledge of Kaurna language was transmitted to her descendants, including her niece Ivaritji (who also has a biography in the IADB), and provided a basis for the language’s revival. Her many descendants were vital to the recognition of Kaurna native title in 2018.

The biographies of the Wiradjuri men Ooloogan (John Noble) by Laurie Bamblett and Wendy Bunn, and Nangar (Jimmy Clements) by Laurie Bamblett, powerfully relate their lives as culturally important members of the Wiradjuri community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their biographies have been linked in Australian colonial history by their intervention as ambassadors of their people at the opening of the Commonwealth Parliament House in 1927. But that is not what defines them in the Wiradjuri cosmos. They were and remain formidable cultural figures, their lives remembered, and legacies treasured as leaders of their people.

The biography of Tommy Chaseland (c. 1800–1869), as told by Lynette Russell, constitutes a reminder of the mobility of Indigenous men and women in colonial times, and their involvement in many and varied industries. Likely born at Port Jackson, New South Wales, probably of an Eora mother and an English convict father, he travelled widely as a sealer and whaler. He possessed notable seafaring and whaling skills, and was an immensely talented linguist who became competent in several Pacific languages as well as Māori. By 1824 he had settled in Aotearoa New Zealand and married into the Māori community. And there he stayed, his life a reminder of the porous nature of geographic borders, as well as the possibility, as Russell remarks, that ‘his Aboriginal identity did not hinder his opportunities and perhaps even helped him to be accepted in a Māori world’. Kath Apma Travis Pernangke’s biography of her Arrernte grandmother Undelya (Minnie) Apma (c. 1909–1990) tells of a woman remarkable for her tenacity in retaining and recovering her cultural identity during a period when Aboriginal people, regardless of their skills and talents, were seen by most colonisers simply as a source of unskilled and unpaid labour. Minnie was born and spent her first years in her home Country but was removed as a young person by one esteemed in White Australia as a pioneer of Australian anthropology and geology, Herbert Basedow. For nearly 30 years, and despite the persistent efforts of her father to reclaim her, this strong, ‘funny, kind and jovial’ woman worked for the Basedows and later his sisters, before returning to Mparntwe Alice Springs to live out her final years amongst family and kin.

Kim Kruger’s biography of her cousin, the Blak feminist, poet, and broadcaster Lisa Bellear (1961–2006), is another striking story of cultural recovery, reconnection, and activism. Born in Narrm Melbourne, after her mother’s early death Bellear was declared a ward of the state and adopted by a European family. Reconnecting with her birth family, she became proud of her Goernpil, Minjingbul, Ni-Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, and Croatian descent and became a prominent and highly effective advocate for Blak rights as a staff member of the University of Melbourne and an elected councillor at the City of Collingwood. Becoming a proficient photographer and playwright, and an influential broadcaster, her legacy is immense.

As Kruger explains, her contribution to ‘the fight for justice and free expression for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is mirrored in the hearts and minds of the women, students, activists, artists, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people she championed and inspired’.

Finally, we republish the story of the Wild Australia Show, a travelling troupe of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women (and one child) that toured the Australian Eastern State capital cities in 1892. The article tells an enthralling story but more potently perhaps, illustrates the potential of collective biography to restore the identities, indeed the personhood, of the hitherto nameless and voiceless. As the authors comment: ‘the challenge is to keep the individual performers in view while also understanding the wider contexts in which they performed, and that influenced their choices and experiences’. This is the particular power of collective biography. Naming is perhaps a first step in recovering identity and biography. Being able to view faces and name their owners transforms the generic into ‘twenty-seven individuals whose lives and fates were shaped for a short time by the experience of publicly performing one’s self and culture for the entertainment, enjoyment, and edification of many, and for the financial gain of a few’.

In these various ways, foundational ADB protocols and conventions have been challenged by Indigenous biography: the idea that 1788 might constitute a barrier to inquiry; that a life might be encapsulated by birth and death dates and that these dates might be precisely known (or even matter); that documentation might determine selection; that you need to have lived in or visited Australia to earn a biographical entry; that Australian coloniality might be beyond biographical scrutiny; that the author of a biography should not be a family member; and that scholarship is solitary, objective and necessarily distancing of relationships with community and land. The promise of Indigenous biography lies not only in its proper recognition of Indigenous lives but also in its reframing of the craft of biography itself.

This is an adapted excerpt from the introduction to Reframing Indigenous Biography, edited by Associate Professor Shino Konishi FAHA, Dr Malcolm Allbrook, Emeritus Professor Tom Griffiths AO FAHA. Routledge, 2024, ISBN 9781032398938. 

Reframing Indigenous Biography

Edited By Shino Konishi, Malcolm Allbrook, Tom Griffiths.

This book explores the history, practice, and possibilities of writing about the lives of First Nations’ peoples in Australia as well as Aotearoa New Zealand, North America, and the Pacific.

This interdisciplinary collection recognises the limitations of Western biographical conventions for writing Indigenous long‑ and short‑form biographies. Through a series of diverse life stories of both historical and contemporary First Nations figures, this book investigates innovative ways to ameliorate the challenges we face in recovering the stories of Indigenous people and reimagining their lives in productive new ways. Many of the chapters in this collection are deeply reflective, aiming not just to relate the life story of an individual but also to reflect on the archival, intellectual, and emotional journeys that biographers undertake in researching Indigenous biography.

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